Transcript: US Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Election Protection

On Wednesday, September 18, 2024, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hosted a hearing on protecting elections from foreign interference in the Hart building.

• Kent Walker, President and Chief Legal Officer, Alphabet (written statement)
• Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs, Meta (written statement)
• Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, Microsoft (written statement)

Notably, Elon Musk's X declined to send a representative to appear at the hearing.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion. Refer to the official video to check quotes.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

All right, everybody. If we could take our seats. My apologies. I think as I shared with our witnesses, we thought the vote was going to start at 2:30. I think the Vice Chairman presumed that and that he'd have a chance to vote and stuff. So we're going to go ahead and get started and we are going to roll through. There are two votes this afternoon, colleagues, and we will roll through these. I'm going to call this hearing to order and I want to welcome today's witnesses, Mr. Kent Walker, President Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer, Alphabet, Mr. Nick Clegg, President Global Affairs, Meta, and Mr. Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft.

Today's hearing builds on this committee's long-standing practice of educating the public about the intentions and practices of foreign adversaries seeking to manipulate our country's electoral process. I do know we've all come a long way since 2017 when, as many folks may remember, there was a lot of skepticism that our adversaries might have utilized America's social media platforms for intelligence activities. It was almost seven years ago that in response to inquiries from this committee that Facebook shared first evidence of what would become an expansive discovery, documenting Russia's use of tens of thousands of inauthentic accounts across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and even smaller platforms like Gab and Tumblr and Medium and Pinterest, all to try to divide Americans and influence their votes.

And through this committee's bipartisan investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election, we learned that Russia had devoted millions to wide-ranging influence campaigns that literally generated hundreds of millions of online impressions, which sowed political division, racial division, and impersonated social, political, and faith groups of all stripes across all ends of the political spectrum to infiltrate and manipulate our debate. Our committee's bipartisan efforts also resulted in a set of recommendations for government, for the private sector, and for political campaigns, recommendations for which I hope today's hearing will serve as a status check.

These recommendations included greater information sharing between the U.S. government and the private sector about foreign malicious activity, not domestic, foreign malicious activity, greater transparency measures by platforms to inform users about that malicious activity, as well as more information on the origin and authenticity of information presented to them. And, this was something that didn't get a lot of attention, facilitation of open-source research by academics and civil society organizations to better assist platforms here and others and the public and identifying malicious use of social media, again by foreign actors. On the government side, we've also seen some significant progress, and let be state right now that the 2020 election I think was the most secure in United States history, and that's verified by election security experts. And I want to commend the Trump administration for helping that come about.

Now, it came about because the progress has been made through a combination of both bipartisan appropriation of funding for election upgrades, things that folks on both sides that I've been calling for a long time. Paper records, risk-limiting audits to verify results, a better-postured, frankly, national security community that we have oversight on to track and expose and disrupt foreign adversarial election threats. And I think a pretty successful effort to share threat information about foreign influence activity with the private sector. U.S. tech companies as well have made progress, although as I've warned all of our witnesses, albeit uneven, since 2016.

These include, and I want to cite because many of you were present when the three companies in front of us and literally 24 other companies including companies where, unfortunately, a lot of this has taken place now, X, formerly known as Twitter, which wouldn't even send a representative today, where 27 companies signed in Munich what was called the Tech Accord to Compact Deceptive Use of AI in the 2024 Election, not just in America but around the world. And while I appreciate the voluntary commitments that were made there, I think it has been uneven about where's the beef, how much has actually been done. Recently, I sent letters to all 27 of those companies. Some came back with specificity, some of you. Unfortunately, others simply ignored even responding.

And why we are doing this and, again, on a bipartisan basis is there's four new factors that I think has raised my concerns dramatically. First is incentive. Our adversaries realize this is effective and cheap. Putin clearly understands, if he wants to try to undermine American support for Ukraine, weighing in and frankly putting up fake information can help him in that matter. Similarly, we've seen, since the conflict between Israel and Hamas after post-October 7th, this has also been a right area for foreign misinformation and disinformation. And again, we've seen Iran dramatically increase their efforts to stoke social discord in the U.S. while again potentially seeking to shape elections.

We've seen lesser from China, but there have been some efforts by China on, not at the national level, but on down ballot races where candidates may not be taking a pro-CCP position. Recently, and literally in the last eight weeks, we've seen a covert influence project led by RT to bankroll unwitting U.S. political influencers on YouTube. We've seen a wide-ranging Russian campaign that frankly has not gotten much media attention because I think they focused on the guys in Tennessee and not some of the slides that we're going to put up later in our questioning where major institutions like the Washington Post and Fox News, the bad guys have basically put out false information under those banners with the goal of spreading what sounds like credible sounding narratives to really shape American voters' perceptions of candidates and campaigns.

And we have seen, and this committee has called this out, efforts to infiltrate American protests over the conflict in Gaza by Iranian influence operatives who again seek to stoke division, and in many cases in terms of these efforts, denigrate former President Trump. I do want to acknowledge that in these recent efforts, you all have played a positive role. I want to thank Meta and I hope our committee's interest in this subject help move you yesterday when you guys decided to take down RT and related Russian influence operations. I want to thank Microsoft for being forward leaning and publicly sharing information on, again, some of the Russian activities.

And I want to thank Alphabet, and I'm going to call you guys more by Facebook and Google for the less informed, when you were one of the first to come forward on the sources on the Iranian hacks. So compliments to all of you on that. On an overall basis though, we've also seen this scale and sophistication of the kind of attacks be escalated. When we think about AI tools, we all know about that. I think we originally thought this would be in the form of deep fakes, video and audio alteration. You're going to see AI type tools being used to create what appears and virtually any American voter would think is a real Fox News or Washington Post site when in reality it isn't.

And unfortunately Congress has not been able to take on this issue. But I would point out, it's a pretty broad swath of individual states and they range across the political spectrum that have really put some pretty significant guardrails in place at least in terms of deep fake manipulation in their state elections. And that's Alabama, Texas, Michigan, Florida, and California. I wish we could take some of the best ideas from those states and bring them at the national level.

Most of you have indicated that you have not seen, and I think the good news is so far we've not seen the kind of massive AI interference that we might have expected, particularly in the British or French elections. But as we know from past times, the real time that this will gear up will be closer to the election. And third, the truth is, way back in 2016, Russia had to create fake personas to spin wild stories. Unfortunately, we now have a case where too many Americans frankly don't trust key U.S. institutions, from federal agencies to local law enforcement to traditional media. There's increased reliance on the internet. I think most of us would try to tell our kids, "Just because you saw it on the internet doesn't mean it's true," but the job of the adversary is to amplify things that are stated by Americans, goes up dramatically.

And finally, we've seen a concerted litigation campaign that has sought to undermine the federal government's ability to share this vital threat information between you guys and the government and vice versa. And frankly, a lot of those independent academic third-party checkers have really been bullied in some case or litigated into silence. For instance, we've seen the shuttering of the election disinformation work at Stanford's Internet Observatory as well as the termination of a key research project at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. We need those academic researchers in the game as that independent source. And again, this is a question that really bothers me and I know we may litigate this a bit. Too many of the companies have dramatically cut back on their own efforts to prohibit false information. And again, we're talking about foreign sources.

And we've seen the rise, and Senator Rubio and I have been on the lead on this, of a foreign-owned platform that has a huge reach, in the case of TikTok, that has huge national security concerns. And I'm very, very glad that over 80% of both the House and the Senate voted to say creative platform shouldn't be ultimately controlled by the CCP. Now, in the last open hearing we had on this topic, we heard about what the federal government's doing to disrupt. We're going to continue to get with law enforcement and the IC before Election Day. But this is really our effort to try to urge you guys to do more to alert the public that this problem has not gone away. Lord knows we have enough differences between Americans that those differences don't need to be exacerbated by our foreign adversaries.

And again, we are not cherry-picking these adversaries. These are nation-states that are in the law of our country. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, others have been designated as foreign adversaries. The truth is we're 48 days away from an election, and the final point I want to make clear is that we need to do all we can before the election. But I also think it's not like at the end of election night, particularly assuming how close this election will be, that this will be over. One of my gravest concerns is that the level of misinformation, disinformation that may come from our adversaries after the polls close could actually be as significant as anything that happens up to closing of the polls on election night.

With that, appreciate you're here, and let me just before I go to Senator Rubio, when we do the open hearings, and I appreciate Senator Corners, Cotton, and a lot of my colleagues getting here early, we are going to do by seniority rather than at the gavel. With that, Senator Rubio,

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Thank you for holding this hearing. Thank you all for agreeing to be here. It's important. It's actually a tricky and difficult topic because I think there are two kinds of things we're trying to address. The first is generated disinformation, and I think you're going to describe some of those efforts today, but that is some foreign adversary, Iran, China, Russia, they create or make something up and then they amplify it. They basically make it up, they push it out there, and they hope people believe it. It's actually something, I remember giving a speech back in 2018 or 2019 warning about AI generated videos that were going to be the wave of the future in terms of trying to influence what people think and see, and we've seen some of that already play out.

That's pretty straightforward. Let me tell you where it gets complicated. Where it gets complicated is there is a pre-existing view that people have in American politics. I use this as an example, not because I generally agree with it, but because it's an important example, there are people in the United States who believe that perhaps we shouldn't have gotten involved with Ukraine or shouldn't have gotten involved in the conflict in Europe. Vladimir Putin also happens to believe and hope that that's what we will conclude. And so now there's someone out there saying something that whether you agree with them or not is a legitimate political view that's pre-existing, and now some Russian bot decides to amplify the views of an American citizen who happens to hold those views. And the question becomes, is that misinformation or is that misinformation, is that an influence operation because an existing view is being amplified?

Now, it's easy to say, "Well, just take down the amplifiers." But the problem is it stigmatizes the person whose viewed it. Now the accusation is that, that person isn't simply holding a view, they're holding the same view that Vladimir Putin happens to have on that one topic or something similar to what he has and as a result they themselves must be an asset. And that's problematic and it's complicated. And as we try to manage all of this, we recall that in 2020, this is now well known, obviously, it's been well discussed, there was a laptop, Hunter Biden's laptop. There was a story in the New York Post and 51 former, and I say former because I have people coming all the time saying intelligence officers, these are former intelligence officials went out and said, "This has all of the attributes of a Russian disinformation campaign."

And as a result, the New York Post, who posted the original story, had their story censored and taken down, their account locked. There was a concerted effort on the basis of that letter to silence a media outlet in the United States on something that actually turned out not to be a Russian disinformation. Even though I imagine maybe the Russians wanted to spread that story, they might have amplified it, but it also happened to be factual. We know based on the letter from the CEO of Meta that the government pressured him during the COVID pandemic to censor certain views, and he expressed regret about agreeing to some of that.

And so there are people in this country that had their accounts locked or even got in some cases canceled out because they questioned the efficacy of masks, something we now know Dr. Fauci agreed masks were not a solution to all the problems, that put out the lab leak theory that at one time was considered a conspiracy and a flat out lie, and now our own intelligence agencies are saying it's 50% likely, just as likely as the natural occurring. So this is a tricky minefield and it's even trickier now because Russia's still doing it more than anybody else. But the others, you don't need to have a big expensive operation to pursue some of this. I think we should anticipate that in the years to come, and it's happening already, the Iranians are going to get into this. They already are. The Chinese are going to get into this business. They already are, and you see them using that in other countries to sow discord and division. It's coming.

It's also North Korea, multiple and maybe even friendly states who have a preference on how American public opinion turns. So I do think it's important to understand what our policies are today in terms of identifying what is disinformation? What is actually generated by a foreign adversary versus the amplification of a pre-existing belief in America, which has left a lot of people in a position of being labeled collaborators, when in fact they just hold views that on that one issue happen to align with what some other country hopes we believe as well?

And I'm very interested to learn what our internal policies are in these companies because I think it's a minefield that, in an effort to prevent discord, I don't want to sow discord. And that's one of the dangers that we're now flirting with. So thank you for being here. I look forward to hearing your testimony.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

And before I go, I just want to reemphasize, I agree with Senator Rubio. Americans got the right to say, their First Amendment right, to say that whether we agree, disagree, no matter how crazy. I do think there's a difference when foreign intelligence services cherry-pick information and amplify it that in many ways stokes division. And that's again where the core of this debate is and we're anxious to hear your testimony. I'm not sure who drew the short straw to go first.

Kent Walker:

Happy to launch. Okay. Chair Warner Chair, Vice Chair Rubio, members of the committee, thank you all for the opportunity to be with you today. Google Alphabet is in the business of earning the trust of our users. We take seriously the importance of protecting free expression and access to a range of viewpoints while also maintaining and enforcing responsible policy frameworks. A critical aspect of that responsibility is doing our part to protect the integrity of democratic processes around the world. That's why we've long invested in significant new capabilities, updated our policies, and introduced new tools to address threats to election integrity. We recognize the importance of enabling people who use our services in America and abroad to speak freely about the political issues that are most important to them. At the same time, we continue to take steps to prevent the misuse of our tools and our platforms, particularly attempts by foreign state actors to undermine democratic elections.

To help advance this work, we created the Google Threat Intelligence Group, which combines our Threat Analysis Group, or TAG, and Mandiant Intelligence. Google threat intelligence identifies monitors and tackles threats including coordinated influence operations and cyber espionage campaigns. We disrupt activity on a regular basis and we publish our findings, and we provide expert analysis on threats originating from the kinds of countries we were talking about, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as from the criminal underground. This year alone, we've seen a variety of malicious activity including cyber attacks, efforts to compromise personal email accounts of high-profile political actors and influence operations both on and off our platforms that are seeking to sow discord among Americans, the way you were both discussing.

We remain on the lookout for new tactics and techniques in both cybersecurity and disinformation campaigns. We are seeing some foreign state actors experimenting with generative AI to improve existing cyber attacks like probing for vulnerabilities or creating spear-phishing emails. Similarly, we see generative AI being used to more efficiently create fake websites, misleading news articles, and robotic social media posts. We have not yet seen AI bring about a sea change in these attacks, but we do remain alert to new attack vectors. To help us all stay ahead, we continue to invest in state-of-the-art capabilities to identify AI-generated content. We've launched SynthID, an industry-leading tool that watermarks and identifies AI-generated content in text, in audio, in images, and in video.

We were also the first tech company to require election advertisers to prominently disclose ads that include realistic-looking content that is synthetic or digitally altered. On YouTube, when creators upload content, we now require them to indicate whether it contains altered or synthetic material that appears realistic, which we then label appropriately. And we will soon begin to use content credentials. That's a new form of tamper-evident metadata coming out of the C2PA program that we'll discuss, I'm sure, to identify the provenance of content across ads, search, and YouTube, and to help our users identify AI-generated material.

We, our users, industry, law enforcement, and civil society all play important roles in safeguarding election integrity. We encourage our high-risk users, including elected officials and candidates, to protect their personal and official email accounts, and we offer them our strongest set of cyber protections, our Advanced Protection Program. We also work across the tech industry, including through the TechAccord that you mentioned, Chair Warner, and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, the C2PA group I mentioned, to identify emerging challenges and to counter abuse. We are committed to doing our part to keep the digital ecosystem safe, reliable, and open to free expression. We appreciate the committee convening this important hearing and we look forward to answering your questions.

Brad Smith:

Thank you, Chairman Warner. Thank you, Vice Chairman Rubio. It's a pleasure to be here and I first want to say, many days we are competitors, but I think when it comes to protecting the American public, all three of us and all of us across the tech sector are in need to be colleagues committed to a common cause of protecting our elections. And I think we have to start by recognizing that there are real and serious threats, including in this election. We've all been reporting on them, we've been seeing them, and you've talked about them. Every day, we know that there is a presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but this has also become an election of Iran versus Trump and Russia versus Harris, and it is an election where Russia, Iran, and China are united with a common interest in discrediting democracy in the eyes of our own voters and even more so in the eyes of the world.

So what do we do? What is the role and responsibility of the tech sector? That's the fundamental question you have put to us. First, I think we should always adhere to two principles. The first is to preserve the fundamental right to free expression that is enshrined in our constitution that Vice Chairman Rubio spoke about. That is and needs to be our North Star. And the second is to defend the American electorate from foreign nation states who are seeking to deceive the American public. How do we do this? I think we have three roles. The first is really to prevent foreign nation state adversaries from exploiting American products and platforms to deceive our public. We do that with guardrails, especially around AI-generated content, but we also do it by identifying and addressing content on our platform, especially AI-generated content created by foreign states.

I think our second role is to protect candidates, the people who are putting themselves out there to run for office, their campaign staffs, the political parties, the county and state election officials on which we all rely. And we do that in part by providing them with technology and know-how, Google, Microsoft, we all do that, and we do it by getting out there and working with them. At Microsoft, we've now worked across 23 countries, this year we've had more than 150 training sessions reaching more than 4,700 people, and we do it by responding immediately in real time when incidents arise as we do to work with campaigns to help protect them. And the third role we play, quite possibly the most important, is to build on your leadership in having this hearing to prepare the American public for the risks ahead.

We do that by informing them, encouraging them to check what they see, to recheck it before they vote, and we do it by I think recognizing that there is a potential moment of peril ahead. Today, we are 48 days away from this election. As you said Chairman Warner, the most perilous moment will come I think 48 hours before the election. That's the lesson to be learned from, say, the Slovakian election last fall and other races we have seen. I think above all else, even in a country that has so many divisions, I do hope we can all remember one thing. If Google and Microsoft and Meta can get together, if Republicans and Democrats and Independents can work together, then I think we have an opportunity as a country to stand together to ensure that we the people of the United States will choose the people who lead us and we will protect ourselves from foreign interference and deception. Thank you very much.

Nick Clegg:

Chairman Warner, Vice Chairman Rubio, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. At Meta, we are committed to free expression. Each day, more than three billion people around the world use our apps to make their voices heard. By the end of this year, more than two billion people will have voted in elections around the world, and we are proud that our apps help people participate in the civic process. No tech company does or invests more to protect elections online than Meta. Not just during peak election seasons, but at all times. We have around 40,000 people overall working on safety and security, and we've invested more than $20 billion on safety and security since 2016. Meta has developed a comprehensive approach to protect the integrity of elections based on several key principles. First, we have strong policies designed to prevent voter interference and intimidation. Second, we connect we connect people to reliable voting information. Third, we work tirelessly to combat foreign interference on the spread of misinformation. And finally, we lead the industry in transparency for political advertisements.

Our approach reflects the knowledge gained from prior elections and we continue to adapt to stay ahead of emerging challenges. One of the most pressing challenges for the industry is people seeking to interfere with elections to undermine the democratic process. We constantly work to find and stop these campaigns across our platforms.

This is an adversarial space and we are often responding to urgent situations with imperfect information. We may not always get it right. So we need to be cautious and in each case, we need to conduct our own independent investigation to identify what is and is not interference. Where we identify coordinated inauthentic behavior, we remove the networks at issue. In fact, we have removed over 200 such networks since 2017, including networks from Russia, Iran and China. We remain committed to stopping these threats and we are constantly improving and evolving our defenses to stay ahead of our adversaries.

I'm pleased to appear beside other industry leaders today and it underscores an important point. People trying to interfere in elections rarely target a single platform. Cross-industry collaboration, transparency and reporting are essential to tackle these networks across the internet, and that is why we publicize our takedowns for all to see and share the relevant information we learn with researchers, academics and others, including of course, Congress.

This year, elections are also taking place as more people are using AI tools. To date, we have not seen generative AI enabled tactics used to subvert elections in ways that have impeded, so far, our ability to disrupt them. However, we remain vigilant and will continue to adapt as the technology does as well.

We know that AI progress and responsibility can and must go hand in hand. That is why we are working internally and externally to address the risks of AI. We've implemented industry-leading efforts to label AI-generated content, giving people greater context to what they are seeing. And of course, we are working across industry to develop common AI standards. We are proud to have signed onto the White House's voluntary AI commitments and the Tech Accord to combat deceptive use of AI in 2024 elections, both of which will help guide the industry to towards safer, more secure and more transparent development of AI.

Every election brings its own challenges and complexities. We are confident our comprehensive approach can help protect the integrity of not only this year's elections in the United States, but elections everywhere. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Well, thank you gentlemen for your... I want to put up the first two presentations. Let me add what Mr. Smith said. I concur that the 48 hours before the election, but I would argue the 48 hours after the polls close, particularly if we have as close to an election as we anticipate could be equally if not more significant in terms of spreading false information, disinformation and literally undermining the tenets of our democracy.

Now, there was a lot of press attention recently on the Department of Justice indictments of the Canadians and Tennessee who were paying off influencers knowingly or unknowingly. What didn't get much attention is the first slide here where under the banner of Fox News and The Washington Post, these look exactly like Washington Post and Fox News? Matter of fact, it may not be what we thought of as AI, but these are the AI techniques to make this so real. Matter of fact, they've even got real authors bylines and the balance of the ads and other things are totally reflective.

This came out of this DOJ indictment. I guess the question in these are, you mentioned comprehensive, they appeared on your site. They also appeared on Twitter's site, X's site. I think it is a real shame that in the previous investigations, Twitter was a very collaborative entity under X. They are absent and some of the most egregious activities taking place. But I'm not sure any American, even a technology savvy American is going to figure out that these are fake.

So where does that responsibility lie? Shouldn't your efforts have been able to spot that? And how do we make sure? Because only after the fact in 2016, we didn't have real-time numbers of how many Americans were viewing the fake sites and they literally were ended up of hundreds of millions. I still remember both the Tennessee Republican Party and the Black Lives Matter site, the real sites had less viewership than did the Russian-based sites.

How does this get through? How do we know how extensive this is? And we have many, many more of these. What are we going to do about it in these next 48 hours to make sure that Americans are informed to be aware. Mr. Clegg?

Nick Clegg:

Well, firstly, Senator, you're absolutely right that it is a hallmark of Russian foreign interference in the Democratic process to generate AI stories resembling real media. As it happens, since those appeared on our site, we have just over the last 48 hours banned the organization that spawned a lot of this activity. The disinformation, Rossiya Segodnya, not least after the editor-in-chief gave an interview where she said publicly, and this is in effect a media organization owned and run out of the Kremlin that she and I quote, at least this is the translation, "Is conducting, her and her team are conducting what she called guerrilla projects in the heart of American democracy." And the panel behind you is a manifestation of that. That is one of the reasons why-

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

I want to make sure I get to my signal. I need to know how many Americans viewed this and other Russian-generated Facebook sites that appear to be media source. I hope to get that information as soon as possible. I also want to indicate there is still an effort, and this is more over here in terms of targeting by the Russians towards specific groups. In this case, it was a doppelganger gang and it was both on Jewish Americans and then one targeted towards Latino community.

They're very sophisticated. I guess it wouldn't be jaw-dropping that they're focused most of their efforts on the same six states that everybody else is focused on. And this again, goes more to both Mr. Clegg and Mr. Walker, they're still targeting paid advertising. We remember in 2016 when we didn't even have controls when Russians were paying with rubles for paid advertising on sites. I would've thought eight years later we would be better at least screening the advertising. Again in case of YouTube and in case of Facebook, what are we doing to stop the paid advertising targeting by these adversaries?

Kent Walker:

Since Nick took the last one, I can start on this one. We have an extensive series of checks and balances in our advertising networks that are designed to identify problematic accounts, particularly around election ads. We require election ads to have registration effectively. And in the 2016 situation, I remember we did an extensive forensic review of our systems and found that less than $4,000 had been spent on our notes.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Respectfully-

Kent Walker:

Sir.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

... as recently as January, I wrote the Treasury Department that said, "Both of your companies have still repeatedly allowed Russian influence actors, including sanctioned entities to use your ad tools." We will get that specific information you and we are going to really need as soon as possible the content, the bad actors, how much content have they purchased on both of your sites and frankly others. And we're going to need that extraordinarily fast because I think they are getting through in many, many more ways than has been represented.

Kent Walker:

I certainly appreciate the concern and we have taken down, as we've indicated earlier, something like 11,000 different efforts by Russian associated entities to post content on YouTube and the like.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

We're just going to need this as quickly as possible, both in terms of-

Kent Walker:

Happy to follow.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

... number of Americans viewing Fox News, what they think is Fox News or Washington Post or advertisements. We need that data to make sure again, that we inform the public.

Kent Walker:

Thank you.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

The area I want to focus on is where political speech is involved and it's this area. I talked about in my opening statement, which is, and really in particular I want to understand what the current policies and practices are as we speak regarding content moderation specifically in speech.

So just as I'm reading and I'm not reading the opening statement for META, "We're constantly working to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation. We have built the largest independent fact-checking network of any platform, nearly 100 partners from around the world to review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages. Stories that they, this platform or these group of people, rate as false are shown lower in feed and some page repeatedly creates or shares misinformation. We significantly reduce their distribution and remove their advertising rights."

Let me explain. We're not talking about the stuff that was up here, that's fake content. That's just purely fake content. It's generated to look like Fox News or Wall Street Journal, New York Times. No one's arguing that that's fake. That should be taken down. Those companies should want it taken down. That's their copyright and their logo and their letterhead.

I'm talking about this. So you've got a group of people that I think are your fact-checkers from all over the world to determine where something is true or not. So let me take you back to a real-world scenario, which ties into what the CEO of the company said, and that is, there were people at one point saying maybe I believe that the pandemic began in a lab. I believe there was an accident in a lab and it leaked out. And at one time that was considered not factual and in fact there was pressure from government officials on companies not to report on that.

How would that work today, a story like that, who determines whether that's true or not because it wasn't true then, but all of a sudden now it is 50% maybe, likely. How would something like that... because there are people that were caught up in that. I imagine that under the policies that you described, if I was out there or someone was out there raising the specter of a potential lab leak, it would run through these fact-checkers from 100 partners all over the world. They would decide whether it's true or not and you could have your page diminished, potentially platformed if I write too much about it. So how does this policy deal with that problem that I just described, which is a real-world one?

Nick Clegg:

In a sense, yes, indeed it is. And as I said in my opening statement, we are... obviously, we all inhabit a world of imperfect information and crucially, and I think the pandemic was a very good example of that, information which changes. And obviously with the benefit of hindsight, we now understand the epidemiology of the pandemic, which we didn't at the time.

When we were in the middle of the pandemic prior to the vaccines being rolled out, when people were dying, when really no one knew what the trajectory was of this global pandemic, we as a engineering tech firm, of course, we're not specialists in-

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

But I'm not asking what happened. I understand what happened. I want to know how this policy today would prevent that from happening. Because if the government is telling you this is a lie, we have proof that it's a lie, take it down and your fact-checkers say it's a lie, then my account gets blocked, gets diminished? Today if that happened today.

Nick Clegg:

So two things. Firstly we do continue to rely on these independent fact-checkers. We don't employ them, they're not part of META. They're independently vetted by a third party organization.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Who are they?

Nick Clegg:

Oh, there's a variety of organizations which specialize in examining what they think is a reliable way of asserting whether something is missing.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Is it a way to know who those vetters are?

Nick Clegg:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Is there a list somewhere like a roster?

Nick Clegg:

No, we have a full list. Absolutely. And we can provide them to you and they obviously work in multiple languages and including the United States. I think there are 11 fact-checkers in the United States and we can provide you with all the information on them. So that's the first thing.

And the second thing is, and Mark Zuckerberg did indeed explain this in his recent letter to the House Judiciary Committee. I think we learned our lesson certainly as META is concerned, that in the heat of the moment when governments and it's governments around the world exert particular pressure on us on particular classes of content which they are particularly focused on. We need to act always and we strive to do this, but of course we make mistakes, we need to act independently and we need to be resistant to the passing moods and passions around particular bits of content, which was particularly the case during the pandemic. People were in effect in a panic.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Let me in a different context, the exact same system. A laptop appears and 51 people sign a letter saying, we used to work in the intelligence community, this is Russian disinformation, and your fact-checkers say we got to listen to the experts. They would know, does anybody, does the New York Post get their account taken down again?

Nick Clegg:

So to be very clear, we did not take down the account or the content, I think X, who are not here, but they did. We do not-

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

But under this policy, if you deem it to not be true because it's disinformation, because some guys signed a letter saying that it was, it would lower them in the feed and potentially reduce their distribution and if they post that story too many times, you may actually lock them out-

Nick Clegg:

Sorry, this-

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

... in this policy.

Nick Clegg:

Sorry, in this instance, Senator, you're correct that that story was demoted in its... I mean it was always available, millions of people saw it, but its prominence on our services was temporarily reduced. And we used to do that to allow the fact-checkers to give them the space and the time to choose to then examine that content. In this instance, the Hunter Biden story, they didn't do so, so that temporary demotion of a few days was then released and it circulated.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

Did the fact-checkers reduce or demote the 51 people who signed the letter or the letter they signed because that turned to be out to be not true.

Nick Clegg:

I don't believe they did so at the time, no.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL):

All right, thank you.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Senator Heinrich.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

So I want to stay on this same topic of the sort of fraudulent news sites that look like something people would recognize from their own news preferences. Do each of your companies have a policy of removal once you become aware of something that is clearly a fraudulent version of a legitimate site?

Brad Smith:

I think the answer is yes. And Vice Chairman Rubio, I thought captured it very well. It actually in my view does not depend on whether the topic had anything to do with politics. Those are counterfeit sites, those are people using the trademarks of Fox News and The Washington Post without their permission and in a way that deceives the public and diminishes the value of those companies. So yes, and I think you'd see pretty universally across the industry terms of use that prohibit that.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

Why does it seem to take as long as it does for those sites to be identified and removed? I know they remain up sometimes longer than I think most of us would hope or expect. And then have you been able to use AI proactively to identify some of those fake news outlets?

Brad Smith:

I think increasingly we are using AI to detect these kinds of problems, and I think AI is especially good at detecting the use of AI to create content. That's one of the things we do and we are able to see things faster. You always have to be in a race, but for example, just this morning we saw a Russian group put online an AI enhanced video putting into Vice President Harris's words at a rally word. She never spoke. And so I think that is one of the goals for all of us to keep pursuing, to identify these things faster and then where appropriate take action.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

Yeah. I'm encouraged because obviously AI is being used offensively and we need to be on our game responding with those same tools to be able to identify and appropriately deal with these things on a much faster rate. At a hearing of the US House Committee on house administration last week, New Mexico's Secretary of State testified that quote, "Years of false election claims and ideological attempts to discredit our voting systems and processes have led to increased threats and harassment to election workers," end quote.

How have you sought to improve your platform's ability to detect and remove content that actually threatens or harasses people who are part of the democratic process and apparatus for fairly administrating elections?

Kent Walker:

I'm happy to take that and I suspect the same is true for all of us. There are two elements of that. One is making sure that we are trying to safeguard our election officials against threats that may be posted online. And I'm confident that all of our companies have policies against incitements to violence, direct threats, bullying, cyber attacks, et cetera. So that kind of material would come down.

The second half is helping our election officials be more protected themselves through the use of some of the tools that we have spoken about, like the Advanced Protection Program. So their information is not being hacked or doxxed, et cetera. Personal information is not being made public and the like.

So between the various companies here, including I know our Mandiant Group has worked with a number of election officials and agencies to make them more cyber resilient, if you will. It's more robust against cyber attack.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Mr. Clegg.

Nick Clegg:

And Senator, again, I'm sure this is in common for all of those represented here, but we also encourage local election officials to use our platforms to communicate with voters. So we established a system called Voting Alerts, and I think since we established that program in 2020, around 650 million voting alerts have been issued by local and state officials on Facebook's apps and services so that voters are properly informed about where and when to vote.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

I'm going to give the rest of my time back. Very uncharacteristic for this body, but nonetheless.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME):

I'll take it. Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Clegg, we've received briefings from the intelligence community that indicate that China is not focused on the presidential election race but rather on downballot races at the state level, county level, local level. And that concerns me because officials at those levels are far less likely to receive the kinds of briefings that we receive or to get information from Homeland Security or the FBI on how to be on alert.

In addition, China is attempting to build relationships with state and local officials. We see the Sister City programs, we see the Confucius Institutes and educational institutions. So how are your platforms attempting to help safeguard the downballot races? The presidential race, I think everybody's aware of the risk there, but the downballot is what really concerns me.

Nick Clegg:

And Senator, I think you're right to be concerned and that's why our vigilance needs to be constant. It can't just sort of peak at the time of the presidential elections. It's something which we need to deploy our policies and our enforcement around the world and around the clock. And you're also right Senator to point out that what we have at least seen, my colleagues have witnessed, but what we have at least seen is that from the, what we call coordinated inauthentic behavior networks conducted by China, some of them are quite specifically targeted at particular community.

So for instance, quite recently we disabled dozens of Facebook and Instagram accounts, which were targeting the Sikh community in the United States. And that is one of the reasons why the central signals that we look for aren't related to the content or even the person, but the behavioral patterns that we see and the telltale patterns are most especially the use of a network of fake accounts. And that of course then manifests itself in lots of different ways. It's targeted at different communities.

But the underlying analysis that our teams conduct is about the behavior rather than the individual bit of content. Because as Vice Chairman Rubio said, sometimes the content can be actually consistent with things that are circulated by ordinary folk in the normal day-to-day business.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME):

Thank you. Mr. Smith, you talked about the need for the American people to be prepared and to be on the alert. Why isn't part of the answer so that we're not getting into suppressing dissenting views or criticism of public officials, for example? Why isn't the answer to watermark posts to indicate not whether they're AI-generated, but rather where they originate?

Why couldn't you do an R, if it came from Russia, then the person who's looking at the post can make his or her own determination, but they would be on alert that this isn't Joe down the street who's posted this, this is someone who's in Russia.

Brad Smith:

I do think that's a really interesting idea and it's one that across the industry people have been giving a lot of thought to. I would say a couple of things. First, I think actually it starts with also picking up on the idea you just described and putting Americans in American organizations in a position to put what's called metadata in effect, to put the credentials in place so it's clear where their content has come from.

We work, for example, with the Republican National Convention and they use that on more than 4,000 images that were released in Milwaukee so that it would protect their content from being distorted. I do think one can then go farther, and it's an important question as you raised. If we find something that is coming from somewhere else, how and when should we identify it? I frankly think the most important thing is that we address content where that kind of protection has been removed and that's been the subject of legislation being proposed, including from members of this committee to protect against tampering. And then we can think about other forms of identification for the public.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME):

Thank you. Thank you.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Senator Kelly.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ):

Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you all of you for being here for this very important hearing. I just got back from visiting our allies in the Baltics who are all border Russia, also to Finland, and they have been targeted by disinformation attacks at a pretty high level and they come pretty quickly. They have efforts in place to try to equip their citizens and their institutions to counter disinformation campaigns. They feel somewhat successfully, though it is a big problem for them. But I do think we can learn something from our partners in the Baltics.

Malicious actors as you know use social media and internet platforms as a key vector for these campaigns that they have against us and are increasingly employing tools. We've talked about this bots, generative AI. So it's my hope that we can also count on the partnership of the American tech industry to aggressively counter these threats.

I want to turn to a specific problem that's of great concern to me, and as my constituents learn about this, I'm sure it will be to them as well. Behind me, you can see a screen capture of Russian-made web pages designed to look like major American outlets, Fox News and The Washington Post, but showing fabricated headlines.

I went through these the other day. I know I think the chairman showed something very similar, so apologies if we're being a little bit redundant here. But these pages were created by Russians Russian cyber-operatives to distribute Russian messages by co-opting the brand of a real news website that Americans trust, both Fox News and The Washington Post. But there are others as well.

These are really well done. I mean, it would be hard unless you were looking specifically at the URL and noticed that something was not exactly right where there was no .com, there was ..pm or dot something else at the end, you wouldn't otherwise know and you would think this is a legitimate news source. They've also spoofed the official NATO website as well, and they use these sites to push messages that cast doubt on Russian atrocities that we know are real. They lie about NATO suppressing peaceful protests. They stoke controversies or even invent them where they don't exist.

And an additional concern is they have specifically targeted swing state voters. So my constituents in Arizona and others, and they seek to influence the outcome of these elections. And this is absolutely beyond the pale. We've got to do something about it. So I'm curious from each of you, and I have about two minutes here, just what are you doing about it?

Specifically with these websites, if we were to go and look for them now, have they been taken down as the Fox News website, The Washington Post, would we still... Is there a way to, let's say we start with you Mr. Walker, if we search on Google and try to find this through a Google search engine or search for The Washington Post, could we navigate from your website to these fake websites?

Kent Walker:

So we're obviously concerned about the larger problem. I haven't searched for these specific sites, but I can tell you, we've launched tools called About This Image and About This Result, which tells you the first time we saw an image appear on the internet. So in many cases, disinformation may not be AI-generated. It may be a repurposed photo.

Most of the disinformation we see coming out of Gaza is not AI-generated it's pictures from a different war. So providing that kind of context is valuable. And then just quickly to say that if content is AI-generated, increasingly the ability to watermark it or understand its provenance through the C2PA cross-industry group that I mentioned before will help all of us do a better job of identifying and removing this kind of content.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ):

But once you find the content and you know it is fake, at that point, can you take action to make sure that your customers cannot to that conflict or to that content?

Kent Walker:

The search context is somewhat different than other contexts where we're hosting information. So let's say YouTube, which would be our hosted content example here. If something is demonstrably false and harmful, we will remove it, in addition to all of our other policies. And that's been consistent for many years. We also have a general manipulated media policy, whether it's AI manipulation or you may remember the cheap fakes that went around some time ago, which were just slowing down videos to make a politician look as though they were intoxicated. We will remove that kind of content, yes.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ):

You said if it's false or harmful, how about if it's just them co-opting somebody else's website like Fox News or Washington Post?

Kent Walker:

I had go back to Brad's earlier comments with regard to the notion of trademark infringement, copyright infringement, as we get complaints about that, we will remove that content, yes.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ):

Okay, thank you.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

I would quickly note, I think most of your companies do a pretty good job on trademark protection. I just feel like Fox News and Washington Post should have gotten that same level of protection. Frankly, they should be weighing in as well. Senator Cotton.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Thank you. Gentlemen, thank you for appearing. I want to bring a little perspective to the topic today. I think this committee's own report, more than a thousand pages, said that Twitter users alone produce more election related content in about three hours in 2016 than all Russian agents working together. I have no doubt that Russia and China and Iran and North Korea are all doing these things up to no good. And if you don't know what they're doing, it's probably no good. And there's lots of things they could do that are very bad to influence American politics. Russian intelligence spent millions of dollars in the early 1980s to promote the nuclear freeze movement which Joe Biden bought hook, line and sinker and Russian intelligence under Vladimir Putin has spent millions of dollars to oppose fracking, which Kamala Harris has bought hook, line and sinker, trying to ban fracking. And there's plenty of things they could do in our election infrastructure as well. They could hack into campaigns and leak their strategy or steal their voter contact information. Even worse, they could hack into county clerk's offices or Secretary of State's offices and delete voter registration files or try to manipulate votes.

They don't even have to get into the election machinery. They could turn off the electricity in a major American city on election day and wreak havoc there. So there's a lot of threats that our adversaries could pose to us in our elections. I just don't think that memes and YouTube videos are among the top, especially when we have an example of election interference here in America that was so egregious.

Some of your company's efforts in collusion with Joe Biden's campaign led by the current Secretary of State to suppress the factual reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop. Mr. Clegg, you had acknowledged earlier that Facebook demoted that story after it was published by the New York Post. Is that right?

Nick Clegg:

Correct. But I should clarify, we don't do that anymore.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that you demoted it. He expressed regret. I assume you share that regret with your boss?

Nick Clegg:

Yes.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

And you share what he said, that you're not going to do it anymore, right?

Nick Clegg:

Correct. So that demotion does not take place today.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Mr. Walker, what about Google? Did Google suppress results about the Hunter Biden laptop?

Kent Walker:

We did not, sir. We ran an independent investigation. It did not meet our standards for taking any action, so it remained up on our services.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Okay. Okay. And Twitter, under the old regime there was, I think someone said, even more egregious than Facebook or other platforms. And again, this is domestic information operations, if you'd like to say. Far more influence on our elections than some memes or YouTube videos or articles that Russian intelligence agents or Chinese intelligence agents posted, which no doubt they do. Just look today, like the New York Times the other day had a fit that social media was awash. Awash, it said, in AI-generated memes of Donald Trump saving ducks and geese. I mean are AI-generated memes of Donald Trump saving ducks and geese really all that danger to election? Mr. Smith, you laughed, for the record, do you want to answer my question? Are you worried about ducks-

Brad Smith:

I think it's a rhetor-

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

... ducks and geese memes of Donald Trump saving them from predators?

Brad Smith:

When I create a list of the greatest worries for this election, they do not involve ducks or geese.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

I wouldn't think so, it seemed like that to me either. Mr. Walker, Google famously did not auto fill results of people searching for assassination attempt Donald Trump, a few weeks ago. What happened there? Why was that the result of your company's...

Kent Walker:

We've had a long-standing policy, Senator, of not associating terms of violence associated with political officials unless they had become a historic event. So, assassination of Abraham Lincoln would have been allowed up until the weeks prior to the assassination attempt. It would've been deeply problematic, I think, to auto-complete assassination after a search for Donald Trump. Those terms are periodically updated. The assassination attempt occurred in between one of those periodic updates. It has subsequently been updated and now it auto-completes appropriately.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Okay. Let me ask both your companies this primarily, Mr. Walker, for Google and Mr. Clegg for Facebook. Gavin Newsom just signed the law, three laws actually in California, into effect that will criminalize the use of so-called, deep fakes before an election. How do you plan to comply with that law? Are you going to go arrest people who are making AI-generated memes of Donald Trump running away with ducks and geese?

Kent Walker:

Senator, it's early for us to understand. We are just receiving the laws, which were signed very recently and we're looking at how we might best comply with a number of laws. There are quite a few.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

Mr Clegg, a lot of ducks and geese memes on your website. Mr. Smith thinks they're funny. He's laughing again.

Brad Smith:

[inaudible 01:06:54].

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

It's fine. People laugh at them. Satire and political humor is as old as our country. It's fine. I'm glad that you're not going to do again what you did in 2020, but I don't envy either of your companies dealing with what Gavin Newsom has done in California or what many in this Congress propose to do, criminalizing and censoring core political speech. Mr. Clegg, do you have any idea how you're going to comply with California's law.

Nick Clegg:

Well, it's only just been signed, so again, we would need probably to look at it more closely. But I think Senator, your central point that there is a lot of playful and innocent and innocuous use of AI and then there's duplicitous and egregious and dangerous use of AI. That is exactly why as I think-

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):

And I have to ask because my time's expired, but I have to ask, who's going to draw that line? Who's going to decide what's playful, innocuous and harmless and what is misinformation and disinformation? And I got to say, some of the people you go to like, PolitiFact and Southern Poverty Law Center, don't strike me as quite neutral sources and I don't think you're going to find neutral sources in the government of California or in this administration either.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

And I would just, when we look at the California law, I'd like your analysis as well of the deep fakes used in political advertising that was passed and signed into law in Alabama, Texas and Florida as well. Senator King.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

Thank you Mr. Chairman. I think the bright line here should be foreign. The word foreign, as has been pointed out, as the ranking member pointed out in here, the Vice Chair in his opening remarks, it becomes very problematic when you're talking about domestic content and then it's being amplified by foreign. But that should be the line. I mean, I don't want you all or the government, certainly, to be the arbiters of truth because one man's truth is another man's propaganda. I think we should have that kind of flexibility.

It seems to me what's happening here is that foreign governments are engaged in a kind of geopolitical judo where they're using our own strength against us. Our strength is our democracy and our regular elections plus freedom of expression. And that's what they are taking advantage of in order to try to manipulate our fundamental way of making decisions, which is through elections. And I think that's... But the issue should always be is there a foreign nexus? Is there a foreign influence in this matter? And I guess the question is, in this day and age, can you determine that given the fact that we've got very sophisticated adversaries in St. Petersburg or Moscow or wherever or in Tehran who may be coming in via a server in Georgia. Can you technically tell when something is of foreign origin, Mr. Walker?

Brad Smith:

I would say the answer is not always, but often, yes. And I do think that there are some threats we should take seriously and we should start with the word foreign. But if you want to see the risks that we should be thinking about, I will go back to Slovakia. Their parliamentary election was last year, September 30th. Two days before on September 28th, a Russian group released a deep fake audio. It purported to be an audio conversation between a mainstream journalist and the leader of the Pro-European Union political party, one of the two largest political parties in that race that reflected what we see in Russia, number one, a good content creation strategy.

The second thing they did on that same day, is they released it on Telegram, which tends to be the Russian's favored distribution channel to get things going. They did it from what was the private account of the spouse of a major official in Slovakia.

The third thing they did is they pursued a content amplification strategy where then one of the most senior officials in the Russian government, as they tend to do, came out the very same day and accused the United States of doing what that audio recording purported to capture in Slovakia, namely a plot to buy votes and steal the election.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

In other words, it was a very sophisticated operation.

Brad Smith:

It is, and this is what we need to remember, you can't have a great play without a great playwright. The Russian government is very capable, very sophisticated, not just in technology, but determined in social science.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

Very determined, are they not?

Brad Smith:

Yes. Absolutely. And that that's what we... They are many things, it's right, I think, to focus on the things that should unite us and say, let's not worry about what we're seeing over in one direction, but let's not close our eyes to what we could see in the other as well.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

Well, I think the question is, number one, it's happening. You've all testified to that. It's happening and it's not a minor project on the path of Iran, Russia and to some extent China. So the question is then what do we do? And I know Senator Collins asked about watermarking, some kind of way to determine the source of the information attribution, but I had a formative experience about eight or nine years ago in this building before any of the election, before 2016, meeting with group of people of politicians, political figures in Estonia who were under bombardment all the time from Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation. I said, "How do you deal with it? You can't cut off the internet or cut off your TV stations." Their interesting answer was, "We deal with it by educating the public that it's happening and they say, 'Oh hell, it's just the Russians again." And that's why I think what we're doing here today is so important and your testimony is so important. So American people can be alerted to the fact that they may be being misled and they should check. Is that a reasonable approach?

Brad Smith:

Absolutely. And what I hope we can take away from this is first of all, there's something very important what Senator Cotton said, not everything's a threat. And as Senator Rubio said, we should always honor the rights of our fellow citizens to say what's on their mind. But Senator Kelly captured something that's critical and you're pointing to the same thing. When you go to Estonia, when you go to Finland, when you go to Sweden, when you meet people who have lived their entire lives in the shadow of Russia, they are on the alert. They know, as we've discovered, that not everything on the internet is true. They just remember that when they read something that's new.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

My wife and I have a sign in our kitchen that says, "The difficulty with quotes of the internet is determining their authenticity," Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Clegg, you were going to respond?

Kent Walker:

Sorry.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

Sorry, Mr. Walker?

Kent Walker:

Yes. Thank you. Just very briefly. In addition to those very good points with which I agree, I do think we are increasingly able to use AI to detect some of these patterns from, as we've discussed previously, YouTube has gone from having one view in a hundred violating our policies to one view in a thousand. And as large part because we are using AI to detect some of these patterns of mis and disinformation that are out there and take action against them.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

You either can take action or you can alert your customers that this has been manipulated in some way?

Kent Walker:

Agreed. And also provide high-quality authoritative information. The old line, the best remedy for bad information is good information. So the more we can promote accurate information about when the polls are going to be open, people's eligibility to vote, whatever else it might be, that's an important part of the democratic process. Thank you.

Sen. Angus King (D-ME):

Thank you Mr. Chairman.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

And I just remind, I agree on the kind of [inaudible 01:15:01] around memes, but I will recall that this committee exposed in 2016, the effort by the Russians to incite violence between a pro-Muslim group in Texas and a pro-Texas separatist group that but for law enforcement, would've resulted in American harm and echoing in how we know, I don't know when these slides were up, how a normal American consumer, even a relatively sophisticated one, would have the expertise to read the URL that closely when everything else looks so closely like Fox or Washington Post. Senator Cornyn?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

I would like to ask each of you to respond to this question. Do you believe that ByteDance should be required to divest TikTok in for TikTok to operate in the United States? Mr. Walker?

Kent Walker:

Senator, I would defer to Congress. I know you have legislated on this very question and that there was a-

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

You think social media companies owned by foreign governments that are adversaries of the United States that are known to use information warfare against the United States, do you believe they should be able to operate freely in the United States?

Kent Walker:

As a technology company, our area of expertise is making sure that they are not distributing malware. We have found situations where such companies were distributing malware, at which point we removed them from our services. But on the broader question of accessibility, I think that's a question for Congress.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

I'll put you down as undecided. Mr. Smith?

Brad Smith:

You can put me down as I think you all have already decided, the Congress has passed a law, the President has signed it, the courts will adjudicate it, but assuming it's upheld, then clearly it needs to be followed. And I'm not going to try to substitute my judgment for the judgment you all have already brought to bear.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

Mr. Clegg?

Nick Clegg:

In addition to that, I would just point out that there isn't a level playing field globally. Our services, for instance, are not available to people in China, so Chinese social media apps are available here, but American social media apps are not available in China. That has been the sort of state of affairs for some time.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

What I'm looking for is some guiding principles here and Mr. Clegg sounds like you think reciprocity should be perhaps one of those principles?

Nick Clegg:

I think the First Amendment principle of voice for the maximum number of people for the maximum amount of time, wherever they reside around the world, is a good principle.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

Well, the problem I think we're having, trying to figure out what the appropriate framework is to think about what you all do day in and day out because it's just presented a bunch of novel and difficult questions. But before social media companies existed, seems to me we had doctrines, laws that governed the way that we dealt with the subject matter we're talking about here today. Of course, what's so different today is that you are private entities, so presumably the Constitution, the First Amendment can't be directly applied. I know the Supreme Court is wrestling with how to figure out what the right way to view social media companies is.

You have your terms of use, which strike me as a pretty powerful tool to be able to regulate what's on your site. But there's also legitimate concerns about censorship of views and of course, Mr. Clegg, you talked about a little bit about Mr. Zuckerberg's letter and the fact he regrets that Meta was being influenced in cooperating with the federal government. And then we have regulations that usually help us in this area or as a last resort, litigation.

So, I'm wondering is there anything about the way that we operated in, the legal framework we operated under before your companies existed that should inform the way that we view your operations today? It strikes me as, we are dealing with adversaries often that view, this information warfare is a legitimate tool. And obviously the Russians and their active measure campaign existed long before your companies existed, but we are an open society and we believe in freedom of exchange and free speech.

But is there anything the way that we regulated or the way the framework under which we understood that newspapers, radio, movies, other means of communication, were handled pre-social media companies that should guide us here? Or are we just trying to make this up from scratch?

Brad Smith:

The one thing I would say without getting into, I think your very important question about the history of regulation of communications in the country, and one could have, I'm sure a vibrant debate about section 230 and the like is this, it's easy to spend all our time on the issues where we disagree. I think the most important thing is we identify where we actually do agree across the political aisle and across the industry because if we can act based on common consensus to address the foreign adversaries, emphasizing again, that word foreign in nation states, we can do the most important thing I think we need to do this year. And I think that can build the foundation for the future and then we'll deal with the rest. And your very important question among that.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

My time's up.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

And again I want to commend Senator Cornyn for raising this piece. We did actually do that on the question about CCP control of a platform that, candidly, is even more popular at this point than your platforms and 80% of the Congress in both political parties said that's not in our national security interest. I appreciate you raising. Senator Bennet.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO):

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your having this hearing and appreciate you coming to testify. Very grateful for that. I think what we are struggling with a little bit in terms of answering the question Senator Cornyn just posed is the sheer scale of the enterprises that you represent. That presents something new to us. And as I sit here listening to us have this conversation, I'm thinking about the people that are going to be sitting in your chairs 30 years from now and the people that are going to be sitting in our chairs 30 years from now, and what are the incentives that are leading us to have the conversation we're having right now and the answers that we're having in this minute, for all the right reasons, are the ones we would've wished for 30 years into the future. I really wish on behalf of the American people, that the American people had had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg, just to pick him as an example, around our privacy and around our data and around our economics.

I don't believe we have had that negotiation. I don't think we have with any of these social media platforms, different Mr. Smith than your company. With any of these platforms about our privacy, our data, our economics, the way we want our children's bedrooms invaded or not invaded, and for better or for worse, they're looking to us to try to begin to have that conversation.

So, first we haven't had it, and here we sit having to deal with the very, very severe consequences across our society. I say that partly as a capitalist, but also as a former school superintendent who has seen the effects of mental health on our kids. And as members of the intelligence committee who are trying to protect the country from an invasion of our democracy across your social media platforms and tech platforms.

When I read your CapEx numbers, it staggers my mind. I can't even get my head around the idea that you're going to spend 170 billion dollars over 18 months on AI investments. I mean, that annual expenditure for your three companies is more than we had for roads and bridges in the first infrastructure bill we passed since Eisenhower was president. And for all the telecom or broadband infrastructure across the entire United States of America, those things together are dwarfed by your annual CapEx expenditure on AI. And I feel like we're being asked to just hope for the best.

I do think it's an amazing testament to American capitalism that you have those resources to invest in the future, but you better be making the right decisions. And part of that I think is a question of whether the commitment, you've really made the commitment on the front end, to safeguard America's democracy, to make sure our elections are protected, to not say that it's up to our citizens to try to figure it out in the hailstorm of propaganda that has almost been perfected by our adversaries and every day is being used by them to divide one American from the next, from the next, from the next, because they see that division as a potential benefit to them and a huge detriment to us.

How much money are you investing to make sure that that you are protecting our elections? Is that your responsibility or is this just an approach that says, let a thousand flowers bloom? I am a strong believer in the First Amendment, but I don't think there's anything about the First Amendment that obviates your need to be able to say to the American people, we believe we have a responsibility to you because we are creature, among other things, because we are creatures of this unique society and this unique democracy and we have an obligation here.

So, I don't know if anybody would like to respond> Mr. Clegg, yeah, please.

Nick Clegg:

So Senator in asked to your specific question, we have around 40,000 people working on security and integrity of our services. In fact, that number is slightly up from what it was back in 20-

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO):

I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the numbers because the numbers don't tell you what the investment really is. And we know they go up and we know they go down. And Mr. Walker said earlier, maybe the AI tools themselves are better. And I don't doubt that, that may be true. So I'm more interested in what the total capital expenditure.

Nick Clegg:

Capital expenditure is about 20 billion over the last several years, around 5 billion in the last year. And to your wider point, Senator, I strongly agree with you, the scale that one's dealing with, whether it's from the tech company's point of view, from legislatures and governments around the world, is clearly unprecedented because the network affects created by the internet on our surfaces alone, you have what, a hundred billion messages around the world in WhatsApp every day. You've got now, I think about three and a half billion re-shares of short-form videos reels every single day.

And much as cooperation between companies at this table and indeed companies that are not represented at this table, it's crucial to deal with the scale of all of that. I would also suggest that cooperation between different jurisdictions in the democratic world globally is important as well, particularly between the United States, Europe, India, and so on. Because I think one of the greatest risks is a fragmentation of different regulatory approaches around the world for technologies which by definition are borderless.

Brad Smith:

I would just, go very quickly, did you want to go Kevin? Sorry.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Quickly, we've got a couple more members.

Brad Smith:

I would say, first of all, I believe that the American tech sector is an engine of economic growth and frankly is the envy of the world. And we should at least remember that. Number two, we do have a very high responsibility to protect elections, to think about the impact on others, on our societal responsibility in so many areas.

Number three, if there is a foundational principle for this country, I believe it's straightforward. No one should be above the law. No individual, no company, no leader, no government. But then number four, look, let's recognize the obvious. We need laws, and I would just say, I put it slightly differently, we haven't had a shortage of debate in this country about an issue like privacy. We've had a shortage of decision making. So, instead of always worrying about where we can't reach agreement, why don't we get something done by taking more action, by calling on us to be maybe more supportive as we could and should on certain days and helping you all so that this Congress can pass the laws we need. I think that's the recipe that we need for the future.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

I can't... I'll bite my tongue. Senator Lankford.

Mr. Lankford:

Mr. Chairman, thank you. Thank you for showing up. We invited several more tech companies and they chose to just decline, to not to be here in the national conversation. So do appreciate you getting a chance to be able to be here. Let me just outline some of the challenges that we face on this that do become obvious to all of us when we get a chance to be able to look at it. This is not picking on Meta, but it's going to be a side-by-side with TikTok, who's not here. But this is just an example side-by-side of content delivery from a company when there was a comparison that was done of content delivery to individuals that were 35 and younger from Instagram to TikTok. Uyghur content, it was 11 to one Instagram. So TikTok hardly delivered it. 11 to one that if someone was talking about Uyghurs, Instagram was talking about it, TikTok wouldn't.

In Tibet, any conversations about Tibet, 41 to one, Instagram to TikTok. They, TikTok just screened it out. Tiananmen and the Tiananmen Square 80 to one content on Tiananmen Square. This is among Americans, by the way, Hong Kong protests 180 to one. That seemed to be a conversation that was discussed on Instagram that just didn't show up on TikTok for whatever reason. Ukraine 12 to one, and this one was interesting to me, there's 50 times more pro-Palestinian content on TikTok than pro-Israel content.

Now, I say that to you to say there's a sense of an outside foreign influence, in this case owned by a foreign entity, trying to be able to deliver content to the United States to affect the national conversation. That's the challenge that we have because there's not a challenge on what Americans want to be able to talk about. The challenge is a foreign entity reaching into the United States and saying, "Hey, I want to try to influence you by delivering content to your box that may try to sway opinions on this."

So two things I would say on this. First of those is, the concern is for not just a TikTok or to a foreign entity, a Russia, an Iran trying to be able to put bad content in misinformation, disinformation, but it's also the feeding of the quantity of the algorithm. This is an area that Americans have got to be able to rebuild trust. That I would tell you there's a lot of suspicion because the delivery of what content is actually coming to your feed is an area of skepticism. Whether that is in a Google search or whether that's in whatever they're getting from a social media network on it.

How do we actually set in front of American people enough transparency that there's a trust that it's neutral in what is delivered, yet your task is to keep people looking at the screen all day. So you're trying to feed them information they want to see more of. How do we hit that rhythm on it because that'll be important just for Americans period in our own dialogue. Anybody want to try that one?

Nick Clegg:

I'll try Senator. I think Senator, you pinpoint a very important issue, which is algorithms in a sense deal with a practical problem, which is there is an almost infinite amount of content that you can show people, but of course people have only got a limited amount of time. They're scrolling on their feeds. So, you have to somehow rank and funnel it. And I believe the way to square the circle that Senator, you quite rightly allude to is giving people confidence that these algorithms are working for them and not against their interests is firstly to give people real control. For instance, on our services, you can just turn the algorithm off. You can just have it chronologically delivered instead. You can click onto the three dots and you see exactly why you're seeing a post. You can say you don't want to see certain ads. You can prioritize certain content and not.

I think user controls are crucial. Secondly, we need to be transparent. We need to be transparent about what are the signals that we use in the algorithms. We publish alongside our financial results every 12 weeks for instance, full transparency report showing how we act on content that violates our policies. We have that audited by EY so we're not marking our own homework, if I can put it like that. I think user agency and control and a maximum amount of transparency for the companies are the key ingredients here.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK):

Okay. Mr. Walker.

Kent Walker:

Just to follow up on that, we seriously take the point about maintaining and building trust in the services. Some of the ways we do that are anchoring our results in raters who are located throughout the United States in rural and urban areas. 49 states at last count.

That's the ground truth for many of our services. But beyond that, we do things like for example, on YouTube, not just promoting the most popular videos, but the videos that users have found the most valuable. We will survey our users the day after.

"Did you have a good experience in the service? Did you find this a valuable use of your time?" Then making sure that we're consistently and clearly and transparently enforcing our policies, which we also publish. It's a responsibility we take very seriously.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK):

It is. It's something that's incredibly important and it's also consistent with law in this. If I could just make one quick comment on this as well. Mr. Smith, a comment that you made earlier that Iran is fighting against Trump, Russia is fighting against terrorists, and we see the noise that's out there on this and the awareness of it.

I do think it's important that we have this conversation to be able to make Americans well aware that not everything that they see is accurate or correct and there are things very deliberate. But one of the challenges that we have that we've got to figure out both as a committee and both from you is attribution that when something shows up, how to be able to designate it.

Here's where that originated, because by the time it gets shared 50 times through different places, people don't know where it originated anymore. There's one challenge of taking off content that's Russian content, Iranian content that's deliberately meant to attack and to disturb Americans in whatever way that may be.

But another one is to be able to make sure that when it gets out there, people are well aware of it. We can't tell the story of this is disinformation, misinformation unless we get fast attribution on that, and that's something we've got to be able to work out.

Mr. Warner:

Again, I've got critiques of all three of these companies and I'll come back to some of those, but on this one they have been more forward leaning, because if they don't share that by the time the IC or law enforcement picks it up, it may be too late. Senator Ossoff.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for joining us. On that point about attribution and identification of foreign covert influence, Mr. Walker, give us a sense of your independent capacity, absent case by case warning or notification from the US government, of content on your platforms that is foreign covert influence.

Kent Walker:

It is challenging, as was talked about earlier. Russia has moved beyond paying for things in rubles and only working between 9:00 and 5:00 Moscow time, so they're increasingly making it more difficult to identify things. That said, we have more than 500 analysts and researchers working on our Mandiant team, Google threat intelligence who are tracking between 270 and 300 different foreign state actor cyber attack groups at any given point. Tracking activities, metadata, et cetera, feeding that through our services, and sharing it with the security teams that are represented here and elsewhere in the industry, and also working with the FBI's foreign influence taskforce.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Let me put it this way. Do you think you're mostly across it and playing whack-a-mole or do you think you fundamentally lack the ability to know how much you don't know?

Kent Walker:

I think the humble and probably accurate statement would be the latter, because the adversaries are always moving forward and it's a constant cat-and-mouse game.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

You mentioned earlier using machine learning or algorithmic tools to try to identify it. Is that on the basis of network activity and posting tactics? As opposed to content where there's a risk of collateral damage, you might suppress bonafide American speech, because oftentimes what the foreign actors are amplifying resembles perhaps extreme or polarizing speech that's happening organically in the country.

Kent Walker:

It's a deep and important question and the answer differs to some degree across the different platforms, because a pure social network, as Mr. Clegg was referring to, will have more behavioral information. We may have more content related or metadata style information.

We do try and share across the different platforms where we can, but inherently there is some sort of assessment of the nature of the content. We talked a little bit about provenance and AI or metadata and AI. That's going to be a component of it. Network activity is a component of it and then behavioral signals will also be a component of it.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Okay. In addition to attribution, let's talk about authentication. Mr. Smith, you mentioned the Slovakian example, I believe. Let's game it out. I think we need to be able to discuss in the open how this might unfold in the United States and who bears responsibility for handling it. There might be some very compelling, seemingly authentic deep fake audio clip which is in fact fake and defamatory, implicating a candidate for office of the United States in the hours or days or weeks before an election.

How confident are you that either you or another private sector actor or somebody else has the capacity to identify it as fake? Particularly where we can't rely on one campaign or the other necessarily to in good faith acknowledge that something which is useful to them, because it deliberately defames and mischaracterizes the statements or conduct of their political opponent, isn't real?

Brad Smith:

Well, I'd say first I think Kent had a word of wisdom in saying we always have to act with a sense of humility, and hence I think we should require of us an extraordinarily high level of confidence approaching certainty before we take action. Having said that, I do think especially given our ability to use AI to identify the creation of a fake and just the good old human judgment that comes from crowdsourcing, especially for video.

We can identify a great deal, and I then think what it translates into is another part of your question. Great. What do we do about it? There will be days or it could be hours when the most important thing we'll need to do is alert the public so that there is a well-informed conversation. But I also think this points more broadly to what is a systemic strategy to try to address the problem that we're worried about here?

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Well, because time is short, let me try this question, ask it of each of you. What will you do? What is your policy if in that critical time period before an election there's deep fake content attacking a candidate for office, which can be demonstrated to be inauthentic, but cannot be decisively attributed to a foreign actor? How will you handle it?

Nick Clegg:

We would label it. We would label it so that users would see that the veracity, the truth of it is under real question. We would label it.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

What about how it's handled by the algorithm and its amplification or suppression?

Nick Clegg:

We would also make available to us the ability to demote the circulation of it.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Mr. Smith?

Brad Smith:

Yeah. We don't have the same issue in terms of a consumer platform, but I think that the notification to the public, the labeling, I do think that's the essence of what we all need to be prepared to do very quickly.

Kent Walker:

I would add to that that we would notify the foreign influence taskforce so that there was government awareness of the situation.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Thank you.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

Thank you, gentlemen. I've got a few more comments. I guess where I'd start is I was there with all three of you in Munich when companies like TikTok and X signed onto that agreement. Amazed and disappointed, particularly X failure to participate or failure to in any way adhered to that document.

I want to make sure we didn't get off just on the Fox and Washington Post, but this is publication Forward. Another example. If we got a watermarking system, the fact that this is content that didn't originally with you, but it was placed on your platform.

These are not watermarked. I'm not sure there's a way that anyone that's a normal consumer, because you've got a byline, you've got authentic ads on the other side, are going to find that. Again, since they ended up on yours, you want to protect your brands. These are brand clients. Why didn't we catch this?

Nick Clegg:

I think the key challenge here is to disrupt and remove the underlying networks of fake accounts that generate this concept.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

We appreciate what you did yesterday.

Nick Clegg:

But that's the only foolproof way that we can deal with this, because otherwise, as you quite rightly say, Senator, we're just playing whack-a-mole with individual pieces of content. The companies on this table and other companies besides, I think, have made real material progress since we assembled together in Munich.

For instance, to agree on interoperable standards of not only visible watermarking, but also so-called metadata and invisible watermarking so that as we for instance, a social media platform, as we ingest content from elsewhere, we can then detect those invisible signals so that we can then alert that to our users. But of course, bad actors, in this case foreign actors, Russian networks are not going to introduce those.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

They're not going to put the watermark on.

Nick Clegg:

Correct. Which is why for us the overriding objective is always to disrupt [inaudible 01:43:58]-

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

But again, but at the end of the day, what I don't understand, and whether this was on Facebook or appeared on Google, I'm sorry, on YouTube or appeared on X. The URL is the distinguishing characteristic. A consumer is not going to get that. Should that be simply the government's responsibility to spot that? Don't we need you leaning in on that issue?

Nick Clegg:

Yes, of course. Absolutely.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

One of the things, because we keep coming back. We're 49, 48 days away. I'm going to hit you, Mr. Smith, as well, but let me start with Mr. Walker and Mr. Clegg. I need to know starting with these, and we will share all of the ones that have come out of the Justice Department report, how many Russian manipulated images that are completely false, that sow dissension, that undermine campaigns.

How many Americans have seen those? Because clearly you've got your whole metrics of the model is based on how many eyeballs you get. We got to have that information. I also believe that there are a series of ads, and we will share again with the companies in more detail, that are getting through the protections at this point.

We didn't know how many of those ads. My concern is when people either undermine and say, "This is only memes or this isn't a serious issue." Again, Americans have the right to say anything no matter how out there it is. But I echo what Senator Cornyn said. The notion even around reciprocity.

The idea that Russia or China would allow this kind of manipulation on their social media is beyond the pale. Of course, they wouldn't. We need that, because the one thing we do know, I think most all of us would agree, in the next 49, 48 days, it's only going to get worse.

Having that data now, not to embarrass what happened at least on Facebook, to say, "Hey, X, millions of Americans saw this kind of fake content." Just beware, because chances are no matter what we do in the last 48, we're not going to stop all of this coming down, but that measure would help identify.

I also think on the ads. I know it's gotten better. Mr. Walker, you mentioned the fact that you don't take payment in rubles anymore from 9:00 to 5:00 Moscow time. But there's still a ton of this getting through and we need better data at this point, so I'll expect that very shortly.

If you still have colleagues or friends at X, I sure as heck would invite them to actually be part of the solution as opposed to simply trying to be part of exacerbating sometimes the problem. We have those who don't play. X, TikTok. The discords, the Telegrams, the others.

They almost in some cases pride themselves of giving the proverbial middle finger to governments all around the world, which I think raises huge issues as well. I'd like to have that information. I think Senator Ossoff has got one more. As soon as possible. I'll have one last closing comment. Senator Ossoff?

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

I'll be brief, Mr. Chairman. Just to note, and the committee has made public some of the underlying information which was contained, I believe, in the charging documents related to this specific recent Russian effort for which there were 32 domain seizures, doppelganger.

Which planning documents specifically identified, "Swing states whose voting results impact the outcomes of the elections more than other states," and named in particular Georgia as a destination for this covert Russian influence. We've talked about attribution. We've talked about authentication.

I think we've also been discussing the importance of having a society that is resilient, that takes a skeptical and critical approach to information. One of the challenges that we have is for some avid consumers of political content, anything which seems to affirm one's partisan perspective is deemed credible without that kind of critical scrutiny.

For my constituents in Georgia who have recently been targeted by this foreign covert influence campaign, but for the whole nation, how do you think about your role? Invite you to comment on the role of public leaders, elected leaders. How do we build that kind of resilience across society such that we don't just accept anything that seems to affirm our worldview or denounce our enemies, but we recognize that foreign and domestic, there's a lot of folks telling lies? A lot of folks have an interest in manipulating us. Mr. Clegg, want to take a shot at that?

Nick Clegg:

Well, the first thing I think, as has been mentioned by a number of senators already, we can learn a lot from countries like the Baltics. Moldova, I think, is a country right in the front line now facing a lot of Russian interference. Taiwan. The Taiwanese election recently.

All of these countries in different situations were dealing with major adversaries who were trying to interfere in their elections. Public skepticism, voter skepticism is probably the greatest antidote to a lot of this, and I do think political leadership can play a role in fostering that.

The other thing which I think is crucial, and that's on us, is every time we find networks like that, we need to share that as widely as possible with researchers, with our colleagues in the tech industry, with governments. For instance, we now publish every 12 weeks an adversarial threat report. Done so in the last few years.

Doppelganger. Senator, you mentioned Doppelganger. It was our threat intelligence team that identified doppelganger first two years ago. We blocked around 5,000 accounts and pages in three months in a three-month period this year. We've placed a lot of the signals that we were able to detect on GitHub so that everybody can look at that, everyone can learn from the experience that we've got. People can then scrutinize it, tell us what we've got right, what we've got wrong. I think that interchange of research and data is crucial to develop public and societal resilience in the long run.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Education plays a role as well. Let me ask this final question. Oh, Mr. Walker, go ahead.

Kent Walker:

Just very briefly, I wanted to give one example, because it's obviously a deep democratic question at a time when trust in institutions of all kinds is going down. But one specific case study that might be helpful. YouTube has launched a program called Hit Pause, which are a series of short videos designed to remind people not to believe everything they see.

That if facts are one-sided, if it's an overly emotional kind of pitch, et cetera, there are a series of these sort of ways of framing things that are often used by people pushing false information. We found actually in independent research that the lasting effect of some of those short exposures can actually last months. People become more resistant to fake news.

Brad Smith:

I would just underscore that. I think that's an excellent initiative. We've been doing similar work at Microsoft. We really sharpened our ability in the European Union parliamentary elections. Ran a paid media advertising campaign around checking and rechecking before people make up their mind and vote.

Reached 350 million people outside the United States. That's why we're bringing that to the United States. Certainly the swing states are critical, and it's not just advertising. It's getting out on drive time radio, local press to help bring this message so that the American public has the information it needs.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Thank you. Final question. Mr. Clegg, putting aside law and regulation, when you think about for example, your employer's social obligations and how you meet those social obligations in the decisions that you make about how content is labeled or how your algorithms treat content. In a society where sharp elbowed political debate is part of the process and free speech is cherished as a value in addition to being a constitutional right, what is the distinction between the role that your teams are fulfilling and making those calls and the traditional editorial judgment that a traditional news organization would make?

Nick Clegg:

The fundamental difference is that we don't generate the content. It's user-generated content that circulates on our apps and services. It's almost an inversion of the top-down way in which information is selected and hand-picked by editors sitting in editorial suites for newspapers.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

But you decide what's on the page.

Nick Clegg:

We decide, as I said earlier, or decide. We have systems which seek to ensure that every person's feed is in a sense unique to them. It reflects their interests. It reflects what they enjoy to spend time on. As it happens, the vast majority of people don't use Facebook and Instagram, for instance, to argue about politics.

News and news links now constitutes around 3% of the total content on Facebook. Most people use our services for much more playful, innocent, connecting with family and friends, family holidays, family birthdays, bar mitzvahs, barbecues, you name it. That's reflected in the overwhelming majority of the content on our services.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

Thank you.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):

That sounds to me like a backhanded description around protection around section 230, which I fundamentally disagree with you on. Again, I don't accept that characterization. That was the same characterization that initially people made about TikTok.

What could be so wrong about people sharing cat videos? Although cat videos may take on a political stripe now. Yet now, the numbers, 30%, 40%, 50% of 18 to 24 year olds get all of their news or the vast majority of their news from TikTok. Again, I just do not accept the notion we're just independent creators.

There are algorithms that shift what you see, how much you see. Tech colleagues that we both know said they've never been a more creative, addictive, crack-like tool than TikTok in terms of attracting and keeping. Again, the effort that Senator Cornyn raised and the vast majority of us here, when at the ultimate, the dials can be turned by a CCP leadership in terms of what content you receive. That is, I believe, a huge national security concern.

I also want to just point out that the independent reviewers, I agree that's good and I do think there is a role for the academic reviewers. I think we're less safe today, because many of those independent academic reviewers have been litigated, bullied, or chased out of the marketplace. That concerns me.

I also hope, and I'd like to see not just one-off answers, but I'd like to see from all three of you something to the committee that Senator Rubio and I will then review and share with our colleagues. I think this point about the 48 hours, Brad, that you raised, I think we have put attention on that, but I think the post-election 48 hours is going to be equally important.

I'd like to hear with specifics what kind of surge capacity each of your institutions are going to have as we get closer, because I'm not going to litigate here whether you've cut back or not your content. Again, not content moderation on a political bent, but content moderation in terms of whether your users actually adhere to your own terms of service.

I would simply state for the record, the overwhelming majority of outside observers, I think, across the political stripes have said most of you have cut back. But you made your points. We don't have to re-litigate. Again, I want to know how many folks have seen and echoing, especially in these targeted states. How many ads have gotten through. What we're going to move forward on.

I bit my tongue earlier before Senator Lankford got on. Listen, I've worked with each of you and each of your companies and I think there are places we agree, there are places we disagree. I do believe Congress's batting record on social media platforms and on AI is virtually zero in terms of laws being passed, maybe with the exception of TikTok.

I would point out that when we had the largest AI dog and pony show in the emergence of AI, when your CEO colleagues and everybody else was there, and Senator Schumer at that point asked, "How many think we need regulation?" Everybody raised their hand.

I've got a half a dozen bipartisan AI laws or bills, some of them doing things like how do we avoid those entities that circumvent the watermarks that you and others may put in. But for the most part, and since I get the last word, I'll leave this without contradiction.

Everybody is for it in theory until you see words on the page, and there's always a reason why. "Oh, we can't really do that. Or oh, my gosh. We do that, we're going to slow down innovation. Or we do that, China is going to leap ahead." This is not the topic for today, but I think there's a whole lot of us.

Virtually every parent in America today would say a few guardrails on social media back in 2014, we might have a heck of a lot healthier kids in this country in terms of mental health issues. Not the subject for today, but something that the vast majority of Americans believe, including me.

I won't go through my statement. We've made some progress. I do worry that this is not going to lead the news tonight, the fact that Russia and Iran, but we don't have the kind of visuals yet. I hope we will get the visuals yet on what Iran has done. But that Russia using brands that most Americans on either end of the political spectrum respect, Fox News, Washington Post, are seeing things that look like it's that content that's not. It's coming from Moscow.

Anyone that thinks that is appropriate, I just don't think reflects where we are in this democracy. I'll end with where I started. We have more than enough differences amongst Americans. We have a constitutionally given first amendment right that allows us to say anything no matter how stupid, unless it is the equivalent of fire in a crowded theater.

But we should have those debates, but sure as heck should be concerned about foreign government services. This is not some one-off entity. These are foreign spy services who by definition want to undermine our country. When they're trying to sway an already very close election, we all should be concerned of that.

I appreciate you all being here. I wish more of your colleagues in the sector would be as engaged. I think I've given you all some to-do work and my hope is we will have some of that information, because the clock is ticking, as you've all said. I would hope we could get some preliminary information back even by middle of next week. Let's see if we can get this as we go into October. With that, I did promise Senator Rubio I wouldn't go off on some other tangent, so I will respect that right now and say we're adjourned.